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Tertiary Ne problems: I'm becoming extremely absent-minded. I get all these ideas for things I need to do, and as soon as I go into the next room, those ideas are blown out of my head and replaced with new ones.

Random

Originally Posted by EJCC

It's that we use it for a different purpose. We go into this thread thinking "What would I put in the SJ Random Thought Thread that I wouldn't put in the Random Thought Thread?" Which in itself is a very SJ way of thinking about it -- trying to be as on-topic as possible even in the randomness-oriented threads.

Also, because it's SJ Random Thoughts that go here, it's a lot more focused on being an SJ.

1w2-6w5-3w2 so/sp

"I took one those personality tests. It came back negative." - Dan Mintz

Sometimes I lie awake at night and I think to myself, Phrenology used to be accepted as a real science. I can't believe people could actually go to school and get a college education in the study of how white people are smarter than other races because of the shape of their head.

Which makes me think about how some of the stuff in my own field, along with psychology and anthropology, will probably be seen as stereotyped junk no better than phrenology 20 years from now because no one is ever as objective as they think they are being. A true blue Pandian-style critique. Though at least more effort has been made in recent years for sociologists to account for their own bias in their methodology.

At the same time, I get why people sometimes call these fields useless--unless you're going to grad school and getting into research there really isn't anything for you to do with them--but I think that in a world where all of these -ologies didn't exist... well, people would recreate them. Because it's just so interesting. People are egotistical and we are fascinated with ourselves. Our culture, our society, our minds. It may not have the same kind of practical application or employability as STEM fields, but people gravitate towards it anyway because it really is fascinating--to draw from individual experiences to explain the larger context, or vice versa, depending on what field you're studying. It's human nature to study and try to explain our own behavior. Though there are too many people getting degrees in these things and then never using them, myself included (I mean, I'm still in school, but I'm not planning on going into research or something).

But to study ourselves--not just in the past, but in the present, and how our present selves study the past--fucking interesting.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and I think to myself, Phrenology used to be accepted as a real science. I can't believe people could actually go to school and get a college education in the study of how white people are smarter than other races because of the shape of their head.

Which makes me think about how some of the stuff in my own field, along with psychology and anthropology, will probably be seen as stereotyped junk no better than phrenology 20 years from now because no one is ever as objective as they think they are being. A true blue Pandian-style critique. Though at least more effort has been made in recent years for sociologists to account for their own bias in their methodology.

At the same time, I get why people sometimes call these fields useless--unless you're going to grad school and getting into research there really isn't anything for you to do with them--but I think that in a world where all of these -ologies didn't exist... well, people would recreate them. Because it's just so interesting. People are egotistical and we are fascinated with ourselves. Our culture, our society, our minds. It may not have the same kind of practical application or employability as STEM fields, but people gravitate towards it anyway because it really is fascinating--to draw from individual experiences to explain the larger context, or vice versa, depending on what field you're studying. It's human nature to study and try to explain our own behavior. Though there are too many people getting degrees in these things and then never using them, myself included (I mean, I'm still in school, but I'm not planning on going into research or something).

But to study ourselves--not just in the past, but in the present, and how our present selves study the past--fucking interesting.

Is there a word for this, re: psychology and the study of the mind? I know the history version of what you're talking about is historiography, and I love historiography.

I'm reading a fascinating book about the placebo effect. There's an interesting theory about fatigue in one of the chapters. The orthodox and accepted theory is that physical exhaustion and fatigue is the result of overexerting muscles and build-up of lactic acid, but one researcher found that energy reserves never run out in the muscles of exhausted athletes; in addition, the percentage of muscle fibers used isn't much different either. Furthermore, many of the performance enhancing drugs don't affect the muscles directly but rather affect the mental state of the athlete.

This led one researcher to hypothesize that fatigue is very similar to an emotion. It's a limiter set by the brain so that you don't over exert yourself and damage your body. This has tremendous implications in treating chronic fatigue syndrome. This researcher thinks that CFS is caused by some infectious episode that caused the brain to trigger fatigue but the brain is permanently stuck in that mode even after the initial viral infection is gone. If his theory is correct, then you can treat CFS by slowly raising the activity level of the patient. This will cause the brain to slowly decrease the limiter and eventually (after several years), the limiter will be gone completely. The book mentions that one person successfully got rid of her CFS using this approach but it took 5 years.

It's important to thumbs down all your favorite Youtube videos. You don't want these artists to get big heads and start producing subpar material.